Mithran Samuel

Home care funding is £2bn short of what is required this year in England, a provider body has found. The Homecare Association said its research also revealed that the market for services was “deeply fragmented” and “over-saturated”, with commissioners purchasing relatively few hours from many providers, leaving the viability of some organisations at risk. In …

Care experienced children are ten times as likely to have been found guilty of offences as their peers, the Children’s Commissioner for England has found. In half of these cases, the child’s first contact with the criminal justice system happened after they entered care, suggesting that the care system was not doing enough to prevent …

Mental health law is undergoing significant change in England and Wales. The current Mental Health Bill will make substantial changes to the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA) and, to ensure you are up to speed, Community Care is holding a masterclass on the reforms. The event, on 18 March 2026 at etc.Venues, Manchester, and will …

A new social work leadership group is seeking practitioners’ views on the future of the profession in Scotland. The Scottish Social Work Partnership (SSWP) is calling for input – from social workers, other social care practitioners, students and leaders – on its priorities in relation to education and learning, workforce planning and the leadership of …

The Department for Education (DfE) has reduced its planned funding for Social Work England this year due to a projected underspend by the regulator. The department had budgeted to increase its grant for the regulator by £5.2m this year, including to help it tackle fitness to practise backlogs. However, this increase has now been scaled …

Child and parental mental health problems are increasingly driving the need for social care, Department for Education figures have shown. Mental health concerns about children showed the biggest increase from 2017-18 to 2024-25 among factors identified following child and family assessments, according to the DfE’s annual children in need census, released last week. And parental …

Three-quarters of social workers in England were yet to complete the registration renewal process with one month to go, the regulator has revealed. Just under a quarter (25,394) of the 105,868 registrants who were on Social Work England’s register before this year’s renewal period started had completed the process as of 31 October 2025, a …

The government has launched an independent statutory review of the regulation of the profession and of how well Social Work England is performing its duties. The Department for Education (DfE) has appointed Annie Hudson, former chief executive of The College of Social Work and ex-chair of the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, to lead the …

The annual number of child protection investigations hit a record high last year but significant harm was substantiated in less than a third of cases. In response to the data, from the Department for Education’s (DfE) annual children in need census, charity Family Rights Group warned that many families were being “dragged unnecessarily into an …

The government is recruiting troubleshooters to help ‘failing’ council adults’ services improve. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is looking for sector leaders to act on its behalf as improvement advisers or commissioners, tasked with helping struggling authorities recover, in a similar model to that which exists in children’s social care services. The …